Space

The shuttle Discovery, carrying a seven crew members and 10 tons of supplies and equipment bound for the International Space Station, rocketed into orbit early Monday to kick off a three-spacewalk resupply mission.

With its three hydrogen-fueled main engines throttled up to full power, Discovery's twin solid-fuel boosters ignited with a crackling roar at 6:21 a.m. EDT, instantly pushing the spacecraft away from pad 39A.

Fifteen minutes before liftoff, the space station sailed 220 miles above the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, shining like a brilliant "star" as it streaked away to the northeast.

Discovery'… Read more

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla.--A Russian Soyuz spacecraft roared to life and rocketed away from its launching pad in Kazakhstan early Friday, carrying two cosmonauts and a NASA astronaut on a two-day flight to the International Space Station.

Soyuz TMA-18 commander Alexander Skvortsov, flight engineer Mikhail Kornienko and Tracy Caldwell Dyson, a shuttle veteran with a doctorate in chemistry, lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome at 12:04 a.m. EDT Friday.

During the climb to space through a cloudless blue sky, television views from inside the capsule showed Skvortsov, seated in the center, flanked by Kornienko on his left … Read more

Psyched for a long, long trip to Mars but can't stand the wait for someone to actually mount such a mission? The next best thing might well be to lock yourself in an isolation chamber in Moscow.

The European Space Agency is gearing up for exactly that. As part of its Mars500 project, the ESA will be conducting a 520-day earthbound sojourn at Russia's Institute of Biomedical Problems starting this summer. At that time, the six participants in the simulated mission will sequester themselves in a mock interplanetary spaceship, with complementary mock Martian lander.

The endurance exercise, originally … Read more

NASA's rover Opportunity is getting smarter through software.

Celebrating its seventh year investigating the surface of the Red Planet, Opportunity is now able to make its own choices about which rocks it should investigate further and which ones it should leave alone, according to a NASA report on Tuesday.

Thanks to a new software upload, Opportunity's computer can analyze the photos taken with its wide-angle camera and isolate rocks that meet specific criteria. It can then determine whether specific rocks are worthy of close-up shots through its narrow-angle, color-filtered camera.

The new software called Autonomous Exploration for Gathering … Read more

The U.K. has launched a national space agency dedicated to coordinating its involvement in civilian spaceflight, with responsibility for overseeing policy and budgets.

The agency, which officially begins work April 1, will negotiate on the U.K.'s behalf with international bodies. In addition, it will take over responsibility for some key U.K. and European space projects, including Galileo, the U.K. Department for Business, Innovation and Skills said in a statement Tuesday.

The U.K. Space Agency has been set up to help spur growth in the British space and satellite industry, which employs 68,000 workers … Read more

Outgoing space station commander Jeffrey Williams and Soyuz commander Maxim Suraev settled to a jarring touchdown in "blizzard-like" conditions in Kazakhstan Thursday after an apparently trouble-free descent from the International Space Station.

Suraev, strapped into the Soyuz descent module's center seat, monitored a computer-controlled 4-minute and 16-second rocket firing at 6:33 a.m. EDT, slowing the ship by about 257 mph to drop it out of orbit.

Just before falling into the discernible atmosphere around 7 a.m., the Soyuz TMA-16 spacecraft's three modules separated at an altitude of 87 miles and the central descent … Read more

An exercise in taking yourself out of, well, yourself is to follow William Shatner on Twitter.

It's not merely that he tries to end each of his tweets with the touching personalized sign-off, "My best, Bill." It's that Twitter.com/William Shatner is so darned revelatory.

A few days ago, the Kirk with the smirk offered this tweet: "Help us build www.MYOUTERSPACE.com to be the best that it can! Your feedback is priceless; you don't want to miss this. My best, Bill."

Good Lord, I thought. Has the captain bought himself … Read more

AUSTIN, Texas--Deep, deep in the reaches of outerspace, there is a star factory. Astronomers have theorized about its appearance, though they've never had a realistic view of it.

Until now.

Last year, the space shuttle Atlantis launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida en route to a very special mission: NASA'S last-ditch attempt to repair the Hubble Space Telescope before it was too late to salvage humankind's greatest tool for peering at the mysteries in the farthest parts of the sky.

In the new film, "IMAX: Hubble 3D," viewers are treated to the riches … Read more

NASA scientists reported Monday night that the space agency has discovered as much as 1.3 trillion pounds of ice on the moon, a finding that indicates future lunar visitors could have a wealth of water waiting for them.

The new data was found using a NASA radar placed on board India's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft. The ice was located in more than 40 craters, which vary in size from one mile to nine miles wide. All are located near the moon's north pole. All told, it is thought that there may be 600 million cubic meters of ice in … Read more